By Johnny Ray Huston

A SPOILER ALERT for academics and horror fans who've read Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws: French director Alexandre Aja's bloodbath of a directorial debut, High Tension, represents a sort of endgame for the remake-revived slasher genre – it's the movie that turns the figure of the Final Girl inside out. This crimson-coated, fleshy tidbit of info won't come as a surprise to anyone who has spent more than a minute puzzling over the mental state of Suzy Bannion in Suspiria, even if Aja owes less of a debt to the giallo work of that film's director, Dario Argento, than to the Ed Gein studies of Alfred Hitchcock (in terms of psychology) and Tobe Hooper (in terms of Brer-Rabbit-gone-berserk human hunting). Yet first-time viewers will still probably cry foul – in various other countries, they already have – when High Tension decides to do the twist.

On the surface, Aja has built a loud, shoe-scrunching, tendon-tearing – and did I say bloody? – adrenaline-rush machine, capping it with a crimson shower of a finale that presents an alternate, unhappy version of the hitchhiking rescue that caps Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The setup is as simple as the execution is stylish: law students Marie (Cécile De France) and Alex (Maïwenn) have retreated to the farmhouse owned by the latter's parents for some heavy-duty studying. Sexual tension simmers in their friendship; butch Joan of Arc type Marie harbors an obvious crush on long-haired American Alex, and because Marie hasn't come to terms with it or come out about it, Alex feels free to repay the adoration with teasing conversation and, as night falls, an almost mean-spirited prank. Yet this duo aren't the only ones traveling toward their rural destination. Introduced with a scene that gives literal meaning to the phrase "giving head," a homicidal maniac (Philippe Nahon) also has a nighttime appointment there. He's even polite enough to ring the doorbell.

On arrival, he uses a piece of restored furniture to dispatch his initial victim, and is soon sending the first of many red geysers spraying across the scenery. The battle is officially on, with Marie racing to save herself and Alex – if not the rest of Alex's family – from a vicious and gruesome death. Heroines don't come much craftier than Marie, who has the forethought to wipe off a wet sink so there's no evidence of her presence in a room that the murderer soon sets about searching. When Nahon's cackling, petrol-smeared, nameless monster – a mechanic who fixes people by killing them – kidnaps Alex and stows her in the back of his ramshackle van, Marie finds a way to prance doe-like into the vehicle as well, bringing the trio to a tour de force gas station sequence that delivers what the title promises. From there, it's deep into the woods, with reality hard to discern from nightmare as Marie drives a hot rod sporting a paint job that eerily reverses the yellow-and-black color scheme of a road at night.

High Tension's high profile says something about the changing commercial tides of French cinema. Aja forsakes the art house shock tactics that have been de rigueur of late for outright imitation of – or, in this case, outdoing of – big-budget Hollywood bombast. A few years back, at the Toronto International Film Festival, I showed a red-smeared still from this film to a sullen and snipe-ready Bruno Dumont, who was at the fest promoting his much-reviled post-Sept. 11 reconfiguration of '70s European art and American horror motifs, Twentynine Palms. While Dumont's brilliant but gratingly abrasive contrarian shocker (currently finding Internet Movie Database raves now that people can see it on DVD without the company of snickering "entertain me" hordes) is designed to have all the audience appeal of a stink bomb, Aja fashions an obvious calling card targeting many of the same reference points but with crowd-pleasing intent. The success of his efforts might even surprise him, as High Tension is surely the first French – or foreign, for that matter – film in years to receive a widespread U.S. release during summertime blockbuster madness. Its selective use of dubbing positions it as grand guignol's revenge on comparatively puritan American prurience. As well as political correctness – Vito Russo would be enraged.

Wes Craven has tapped Aja to update The Hills Have Eyes, yet Aja's already made the type of '70s backwoods horror that inspires remakes – it just happens to be set in contemporary France. And it's more than ready for export, a point its star's tacky moniker drives home. De France proves an apt match for Gallic icon of abjection Nahon, who gleefully takes his murderous pig persona from Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone and Irreversible into sheer caricature territory here. Television ads for High Tension may make liberal use of its heroine in an ass-kicking guise that recalls (where art thou?) Lori Petty during her Tank Girl bid for stardom, but don't be misled. Ultimately, the movie presents itself as one woman's, rather than a feminist, revenge fantasy. The conceit may be ludicrous, but all the psychosexual symbols are perfectly in place – Aja is French, after all.

'High Tension' opens Fri/10 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.